Universes Beyond Has Come for 'Dungeons & Dragons'
'Magic: The Gathering' crossovers have made Hasbro a lot of money. Now they're turning their eyes to 'Dungeons & Dragons,' and I'm not sure it'll work.
In 2023, Wizards of the Coast released Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, a relatively small-scoped, non-standard legal set crossing Magic: The Gathering over with Tolkien's beloved fantasy universe. People grumbled, but it was fine—Lord of the Rings is one of the foundational texts of fantasy as we know it, and fit perfectly with Magic's established vibe, even if it did represent a slippery slope.
Two years later, Magic: The Gathering made Hasbro almost two billion dollars in a year, off of the backs of collaborations with Marvel Comics, Final Fantasy, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And now that crossover mania has arrived on the doorsteps of the Forgotten Realms.
For the most part, I've greatly enjoyed what is now known as "Universes Beyond," the catch-all brand used by Magic and now, as of announcements at GenCon 2026 last night, D&D, to refer to its crossover collaborations. Tales of Middle-earth and then Final Fantasy brought me back to playing Magic in a way I hadn't been into it since I was a teenager, and this is hopefully a safe space to admit that I've pre-ordered a frankly disgusting amount of this November's Star Trek set. If I don't build a Captain Janeway landfall deck, I will cry. Also, if I don't pull one of the Kate Mulgrew signature cards, but let's put aside that delusion for now.
D&D, then, probably rolled a nat 20 with its own Universes Beyond announcements: a one-two punch of World of Warcraft, one of my favorite games of all time, and Star Wars, which is, well, you know. Somewhere out there in an office at Wizards of the Coast, somebody probably pulled a Gendo pose and sat there thinking, "Hehe, got 'im."
They're probably going to be right. Probably. And yet watching the announcements roll in last night, I found myself surprisingly much more wary of how Universes Beyond will play out in D&D than I have been with Magic.